Hello Whitechapel. I haven't been here in a while, but I just read Warren's backmatter essay in Doktor Sleepless #12 (could have read it a few days ago on the site, but I wanted to save it for when I had a physical copy of the issue). I have a few things to contribute where "shitgaze" is concerned.

OK, back in the summer of 2006, I booked a show (in my hometown of Richmond, VA) for my friend Jeb's band, Dear Astronaut, from Milwaukee, WI. Their bassist at the time was Kevin De Broux, who also had a band called Pink Reason. Pink Reason played the show too, but it was just Kevin by himself, with a guitar and a laptop. As I said, that was summer 2006. Kevin had a 7 inch single with him at the time, and I bought one. He had self-released it, but had plans to release an album on Siltbreeze Records in the near future. That album, "Cleaning The Mirror," came out in early 2007. Pink Reason became a real band for the purposes of touring behind that album, and started playing with Psychedelic Horseshit and Times New Viking a lot. A while after that started going on, Kevin posted a jpg of an NME article about his band and several others, including PH and TNV, to a message board that all of us post on. You can see that article here:

I was like, "Dude, 'shitgaze'? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard." Kevin thought it was funny, though. And I guess it's kind of caught on now, though I guess Warren's right that the genre name didn't exist when A Place To Bury Strangers released their album in 2007 (though I can see why it's retroactively applied to them). I'm pretty sure the NME article is the first public use of the term.

All right, I'm not sure if any of you care about that, but I felt compelled to share. Carry on.

This passage quotes "a certain chinese encyclopedia", the (completely fictional) "Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge", in which it is written that animals are divided into:

1. those that belong to the Emperor, 2. embalmed ones, 3. those that are trained, 4. suckling pigs, 5. mermaids, 6. fabulous ones, 7. stray dogs, 8. those included in the present classification, 9. those that tremble as if they were mad, 10. innumerable ones, 11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, 12. others, 13. those that have just broken a flower vase, 14. those that from a long way off look like flies.

Borges is a reasonable point of comparison (though Borges disdained the cheap lager favored by NME writers.) NME is fundamentally a journal of fiction, but a salting of fact serves to deepen its ambiguity. Note that I respect them for this.

NME staff were the original creators of the now-popular Taxonomy drinking game. Play moves anti-clockwise from the dealer. In turn, each player draws a red card, a white card and a black card from three randomly-shuffled color-coded piles. The three cards laid end-to-end form the name of a subgenre. Each player then submits the name of a band that belongs in that subgenre. Any player who fails to name a band (or whose band is a poor fit) must drink.

I saw MBV about 18 years ago and had the same experience with my eardrums. Though then they were going bananas with "You Made Me Realise" which had in it's middle a prolonged slowly rising wall of noise which they sustained for ages and was very very fucking impressive.